From the start of her recording career in country music four decades ago until today, the
singer-songwriter has chosen tunes without regard to boundaries or conventions.

Her artistic, open-minded drive was recently demonstrated as she discussed the inspiration for
reissuing her watershed 1995 album,
Wrecking Ball.

“This album’s obviously very special to me,” said the 67-year-old, who is touring with Daniel
Lanois, her producer and collaborator on the album.

“Daniel and I have done shows together in the last few years — mainly benefits — and we just
love playing those songs,” she said from her home in Nashville, Tenn. “It shows our affection for
this record that we’ll go to the trouble of doing the reissue and touring.”

Wrecking Ball is being released today in a deluxe three-disc set — the first, a remaster
of the original album; the second, a disc of bonus material, with unreleased songs and alternate
takes; and the third, a DVD with a making-of documentary.

Harris and Lanois are offering a limited tour in support of the reissue — a rarity in the world
of vintage recordings.

“We didn’t tour it a lot when it first came out in ’95, so a lot of people didn’t know about it
then,” she said. “But one person would tell another person, and it’s nice when it happens that way
on its own.”

In a sense,
Wrecking Ball provided an ambitious and richly textured template for the coalescing
Americana movement before it was given that name.

The music was rooted in country, folk, blues and gospel, but — with the sonic wizardry of Lanois
in the mix — it also had an experimental edge that took it well beyond musical archaeology.

Harris’ deep connection with the country genre is evident on her 1975 major-label debut,
Pieces of the Sky, in covers of
The Bottle Let Me Down (Merle Haggard),
If I Could Only Win Your Love (the Louvin Brothers) and
Coat of Many Colors (Dolly Parton).

Harris interspersed them with left-field choices such as
For No One (the Beatles),
Bluebird Wine (Rodney Crowell),
Sleepless Nights (the Everly Brothers) and her own stunning ballad
Boulder to Birmingham.

For the next 20 years, she continued to reach far and wide for material — to Chuck Berry, Guy
Clark, Steve Earle, Willie Nelson, Bruce Springsteen, Lucinda Williams, Jesse Winchester and a
virtual curator’s guide to many of the greatest 20th-century songwriters.

Still, even with such a boundary-stretching history,
Wrecking Ball marked a bold departure from her country base — a sonic collaboration with
producer as well as songwriter and instrumentalist Lanois, then best-known for his work on
The Joshua Tree by U2.

The sound approached nothing else that had emerged from Nashville.

As a result, the country audience didn’t know what to make of it, and country radio programmers
ignored it, although Harris’ core following embraced the music over time.

The album initially peaked at No. 94 on the Billboard 200 chart, and it spent just seven weeks
on that list.

In the succeeding 19 years, however, it has sold a respectable 365,000 copies, according to
Nielsen SoundScan — making it the second-best seller for Harris (behind
Red Dirt Girl in 2000) during the era since SoundScan began tracking retail sales in
1991.